How the CIA hid their MKULTRA mind control program

Back in the early 1990s, I interviewed John Marks, author of Search for the Manchurian Candidate. This was the book (1979) that helped expose the existence and range of the infamous CIA MKULTRA program.

Marks related the following facts to me. He had originally filed many Freedom of Information (FOIA) requests for documents connected to the CIA’s mind-control program. He got nothing back.

Finally, as if to play a joke on him, someone at the CIA sent Marks 10 boxes of financial and accounting records. The attitude was, “Here, see what you can do with this.”

I’ve seen some of those records. They’re very boring reading.

But Marks went through them, and lo and behold, he found he could piece together MKULTRA projects, based on the funding data.

Eventually, he assembled enough information to begin naming names. He conducted interviews. The shape of MKULTRA swam into view. And so he wrote his book, Search for the Manchurian Candidate.

He told me that three important books had been written about MKULTRA, and they all stemmed from those 10 boxes of CIA financial records. There was his own book; Operation Mind Control by Walter Bowart; and The Mind Manipulators by Alan Scheflin and Edward Opton.

After publishing his book, Marks continued to press the CIA for more MKULTRA information. He explained to me what then happened. A CIA official told him the following: in 1962, after ten years of mind-control experiments, the whole program had been shifted over to another internal CIA department, the Office of Research and Development (ORD).

The ORD had a hundred boxes of information on their MKULTRA work, and there was no way under the sun, Marks was told, he was ever going to get his hands on any of that. It was over. It didn’t matter how many FOIA requests Marks filed. He was done. The door was shut. Goodbye.

The CIA went darker than it ever had before. No leaks of any kind would be permitted.

In case there is any doubt about it, the idea of relying on the CIA to admit what it has done in the mind-control area, what it is doing, and what it will do should be put to bed by John Mark’s statements. The CIA always has been, and will continue to be, a rogue agency.

To give you an idea of how far the CIA, the US military, and its allied academics will go in MKULTRA “research,” here is what I wrote in 1995 about several human experiments. My information was based on the three key books I mentioned above, as well as Martin Lee’s classic, Acid Dreams:

“Dr. Robert Heath of Tulane University, as early as 1955, working for the Army, gave patients LSD while he had electrodes implanted deep inside their brains.”

“In the mid-1950’s, Paul Hoch, M.D., a man who would become Commissioner of Mental Hygiene for the State of New York, then a laborer in the field for the CIA, gave a ‘pseudoneurotic schizophrenic’ patient mescaline. The patient had a heaven-and-hell journey on the compound. But Hoch followed this up with a transorbital leucotomy [aka lobotomy]… Hoch also gave a patient LSD, and a local anesthetic, and then proceeded to remove pieces of his cerebral cortex, asking at various moments whether the patient’s perceptions were changing.”

People need to understand how the history of mind control and psychiatry are interwoven, and how the madmen and murderers within these “professions” are content to use torture “in the name of science.”

From a naturalnews.com article by the heroic whistleblower, psychiatrist Dr. Peter Breggin (“Never again! The real history of psychiatry”), we get insight into one aspect of that history.

Breggin: “[Before World War 2, in America], organized psychiatry had been sterilizing tens of thousands of Americans. For a time in California, you couldn’t be discharged from a state hospital unless you were sterilized. In Virginia the retarded were targeted. American advocates of sterilization went to Berlin to help the Nazis plan their sterilization program. These Americans reassured the Germans that they would meet no opposition from America in sterilizing their mentally and physically ‘unfit’ citizens.”

“While the murder of mental patients was going full swing in Germany, knowledgeable American psychiatrists and neurologists didn’t want to be left out. In 1942, the American Psychiatric Association held a debate about whether to sterilize or to murder low IQ ‘retarded’ children when they reached the age of five. Those were the only two alternatives in the debate: sterilization or death.”

“After the debate, the official journal of the American Psychiatric Association published an editorial in which it chose sides in favor of murder (“Euthanasia” in the American Journal of Psychiatry, 1942, volume 99, pp. 141-143). It said psychiatrists would have to muster their psychological skills to keep parents from feeling guilty about agreeing to have their children killed.”

The psychiatrists who later went to work for the CIA, in the MKULTRA program, were devoid of conscience. Any experiment was a good experiment. Human beings were “useful subjects.”

Here is an MKULTRA sub-project you may not have heard of. I wrote about it several years ago—

Some would say the 1940s and 50s were the most vibrant and innovative period in the history of American jazz.

During those years, it was common knowledge that musicians who were busted for drug use were shipped, or volunteered to go, to Lexington, Kentucky. Lex was the first Narcotics Farm and US Health Dept. drug treatment hospital in the US.

It’s also reported that Ray Charles was there, and William Burroughs, Peter Lorre, and Sammy Davis, Jr.

It was supposed to be a rehab center. A place for drying out.

But it was something else too. Lex was used by the CIA as one of its MKULTRA centers for experimentation on inmates.

The doctor in charge of this mind control program was Harris Isbell. Isbell was, at the same time, a member of the FDA’s Advisory Committee on the Abuse of Depressant and Stimulant Drugs.

Isbell gave LSD and other psychedelics to inmates at Lex.

At Sandoz labs in Switzerland, Dr. Albert Hofmann, the discoverer of LSD, also synthesized psilocybin from magic mushrooms. The CIA got some of this new synthetic from Hofmann and gave it to Isbell so he could try it out on inmates at Lex.

Isbell worked at Lex from the 1940s through 1963. It is reported that in one experiment, Isbell gave LSD to 7 inmates for 77 consecutive days. At 4 times the normal dosage. That is a chemical hammer of incredible proportions.

To induce inmates to join these MKULTRA drug experiments, they were offered the drug of their choice, which in many cases was heroin. So at a facility dedicated to drying out and rehabbing addicts, the addicts were subjected to MKULTRA experiments and THEN a re-establishment of their former habit.

Apparently, as many as 800 different drugs were sent to Isbell by the CIA or CIA allies to use on patients at Lex. Two of the allies? The US Navy and the US National Institute of Mental Health—proof that MKULTRA extended beyond the CIA.

In another MKULTRA experiment at Lex, nine men were strapped down on tables. They were injected with psilocybin. Bright lights were beamed at their eyes—a typical mind control component.

During Isbell’s tenure, no one knows how many separate experiments he ran on the inmates.

As I say, Lex was the main stop for drying out for NY jazz musicians. How many of them were taken into these MKULTRA programs?

As Martin Lee explains in his book, Acid Dreams, “It became an open secret…that if the [heroin] supply got tight [on the street], you could always commit yourself to Lexington, where heroin and morphine were doled out as payment if you volunteered for Isbell’s whacky drug experiments. (Small wonder Lexington had a return rate of 90%.)”

A June 15, 1999, Counterpunch article by Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair, “CIA’s Sidney Gottlieb: Pusher, Assassin & Pimp— US Official Poisoner Dies,” contains these quotes on Dr. Isbell:

“Gottlieb also funded the experiments of Dr. Harris Isbell. Isbell ran the Center for Addiction Research in Lexington, Kentucky. Passing through Isbell’s center was a captive group of human guinea pigs in the form of a steady stream of black heroin addicts. More than 800 different chemical compounds were shipped from Gottlieb to Lexington for testing on Isbell’s patients.”

“Perhaps the most infamous experiment came when Isbell gave LSD to seven black men for seventy-seven straight days. Isbell’s research notes indicates that he gave the men ‘quadruple’ the ‘normal’ dosages. The doctor marveled at the men’s apparent tolerance to these remarkable amounts of LSD. Isbell wrote in his notes that ‘this type of behavior is to be expected in patients of this type’.”

“In other Gottlieb-funded experiment at the Center, Isbell had nine black males strapped to tables, injected them with psylocybin, inserted rectal thermometers, had lights shown in their eyes to measure pupil dilation and had their joints whacked to test neural reactions.”

If you think these experiments were so extreme they bear no resemblance to modern psychiatry, think again. Thorazine, the first so-called anti-psychotic drug, was researched on the basis of its ability to make humans profoundly quiescent and passive. Electroshock and lobotomy are straight-out torture techniques that also destroy parts of the brain. SSRI antidepressants increase violent behavior, including homicide. Among its many documented effects, Ritalin can induce hallucinations and paranoia.

Well, all these effects are part and parcel of the original (and ongoing) MKULTRA.

But now the whole population, via psychiatry, is included in the experiment.

Which is one reason why the right to refuse medication must be protected and expanded.

The author of three explosive collections, THE MATRIX REVEALED, EXIT FROM THE MATRIX, and POWER OUTSIDE THE MATRIX, Jon was a candidate for a US Congressional seat in the 29th District of California. He maintains a consulting practice for private clients, the purpose of which is the expansion of personal creative power. Nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, he has worked as an investigative reporter for 30 years, writing articles on politics, medicine, and health for CBS Healthwatch, LA Weekly, Spin Magazine, Stern, and other newspapers and magazines in the US and Europe. Jon has delivered lectures and seminars on global politics, health, logic, and creative power to audiences around the world. You can sign up for his free NoMoreFakeNews emails here or his free OutsideTheRealityMachine emails here.

Loved this report Jon! This is important stuff. You bring up a good question about how useful some LSD subjects were. Those who practice programming minds, sift for levels of IQ and functionality. some testing is done in the womb. other testing at maybe 2, closer examination begins at 6, I believe. they look at the circuits for density of nerves and connections. They measure for IQ and function. They pick the absolute cream of the crop to become “mind files” and “computer processors,” all from withing the brain.

they can be used for other things as well, but as a mind file and computer, they are at their most valuable to their “owners.” as the IQ and function go down, they can use them for assassins, sex slaves, and lesser ones be programmed to go off and carry out assigned activities when triggered.

What is best about mind slaves is that they are 100% secure, unlike computers and networks. not amount of torture can make them talk. but in their 30s, the “walls” they put into the brains, begin to break down and leak. Then you start getting disclosure.. they will either kill the slave or discredit them.

but what is most interesting to me in this is that why let anyone live to expose you? Its seems to me that there appears to be a secret court, hidden away in another form of existence we do not well understand, that demands a certain amount of fair play and disclosure or we would never ever hear anything.

You sort of show that when you mention that Marks got boxed of paper that “appeared to have nothing,” but in reality, they did have value if one made the effort and was thorough and looked carefully.

I don’t know what is fully offered in your Matrix deal, and you may have addressed what I will being up. As we are being tested by entities, to see how much or how little we put our brains to use, we demon-strate either potential or not, of what we are capable of, individually and/or as a species, too.

Knowledge and understanding do not come easy. They require effort, even lots of effort and require a lot of detail, too, as Marks found out, too. Opportunity only comes to those who dig deep, long, and often. Its not for the lazy or the stupid. In essence, IQ and brilliance depend on solid character every bit as much as good circuits do. Part of the goal of MKULTRA is to get great use, but not individuality of mind. They forcefully develop skills and then control how those are used. but intheir 30s, some begin to show character and I am not sure character is easy to identify or predict as to if, when or where it will manifest.

we are seeing the evidence presented here on earth in the physical realm, what the potential, but not the realization of that potential, can produce. It remains as to who has the goods and who does not. That “other” realm is sort of picking minds just as MK programmers do, to see who is useful and wants to develop their potential to its maximum, and who could care less. If you do not care, you have to go.

You could be right, but from my experience living in the DC area and knowing people in the company…dumb as a box of rocks comes to mind.
I thought they were pretending to be stupid as a cover, but a relative told me…no they are actually stupid, no cover.

I have to keep coming back to the concept that we are an engineered species on this planet and “they” ain’t finished with the project. The whole transhuman and cloning agenda is now being slipped into human conciousness via slow “leaks”. Personally I like William Buhlman’s and Wes Penre’s analysis of who homo sapien sapiens are and what we can if we aren’t happy about “their” agenda. Lotta Continua…

Your investigations should stretch wider than this to the Pentagon. Douglas Dietrich reveals some very interesting materials on their experiments with drugs on prison inmates, meddling with the effects of hypnosis and a culture behind Satanism “dressed as Christianity”.

You bring up some good points, Ozzie. Aquino was a Satanist and big wig army man, who was very impressed by Nazi spirit practices and their level of technology. and Satanism does hide in churches. the Presbyterian church in particular here in the USA. The Ramseys of Jon Benet fame, attended a Presbyterian church. They guy who kidnapped Elizabeth Smart sought refuge and help in a Presbyterian church. Then there is the Mansfield Ohio Presbyterian church scandal that divided the town in two because of alleged Satan worship and raping and doing porn with the kids in the church.

Brice Taylor’s family belonged to a Baptist church that worshiped Satan. The special families had tunnels from their places to the church and the CIA was involved to with programming Brice and the parents had been programed before her.

I’ve known an old classmate from my schooldays for 47 years. He would tell me tales of how in grade school,he was invited into taking free classes for gifted young . Few parents will say no, for free education for their child. Parents can’t sign the papers fast enough for free education. He then had something inserted deep up his noise that hurt him greatly, and gave him a nose bleed. Later he felt a bump on his ankle, and cut out a small glass device. He believes he was being programed to be a super soldier or assassin. He had great promise as a writer of science fiction, as an artist. Today he is a wreck,who lives just to get drunk, and bemoan what they did to him. ” I am just a victim” and, “they did things to me! ” is all he can say. 55 years later.these memories have tortured him.I’ve heard that if one has at least one parent foreign born, one can sue over such treatment. Not so if both parents are born American citizens. I wonder how many thousands of the baby boom generation, with so much promise were likewise destroyed being unknowing child human guinea pigs. This has to rank up there with the hundreds of thousands exposed to agent orange from the Vietnam war.

I never heard the term super soldiers til X-Files. I went into the Marines as a contentious objector. I know that sounds like an Oxy, but so did Alvin York. After that X-Files super soldier episodes, I see that they’ve been working on that for years.

Both my dad and his twin were WWII Vets. One Omaha Beach to Berlin, and the other the Canal to Tokyo. They both were guinea pigs. One with Asbestos, and the other with radiation.

I’ve only told a couple close friends this, but one day my DI (Damn Idiot) and had a heart to heart. He seemed to think I’d be better serving the Corps as a sniper, or Recon instead of a slimy air winger. Although I knew I’d excel at either one, I wanted the fast paced life on an air field. This really pissed him off. I guess usually people that go into this is by recommendation of the DI’s. You just can’t walk into the recruiters and say I want to be a sniper, or I want to be a Recon Ranger and get it. Of coarse I went from the meritorious list, to the shit list. But what I see in hind sight is he was setting me up for the “corporation”. I still wonder what if”, but don’t have any regrets. If he would of asked to be on the Marine Corps shooting team,,,, I wouldn’t thought twice about it.

When I got out of boot, my buddy and I hooked up immediately. After a few minutes Irv looks at me and say’s, “Oh God Abe, I was so afraid they’d brain wash you like they did to Dan and Paul”. I said Irv. “they SI’d the livin shit out of me, and all I’d do is laugh”. All they did was make me defiant.

I don’t doubt they had implants in those days. There was a lot of things they did on the quiet. No surprise there.

I might be a bit of a drunk today. But what my drinking does is fuels the fire for Justice. Not to be confused with Just-Us. At least during my stint, I saved one life individually, two lives with my crew, and several lives with the crash unit as a whole. Didn’t have to kill any one, but came close.

I must admit, this stuff reads like an Alien/UFO story. Here is something from an obituary of one of the “actors”

“ALBANY, Dec. 15 (AP)—Dr. Paul H. Hoch, State Com­missioner of Mental Hygiene, collapsed and died at his home here tonight. He was 62 years old.

Dr. Hoch was appointed com­missioner on July 7, 1955, by Gov. Averell Harriman and was reappointed by Governor Rock­efeller.

Courteous and Cool

To cope with the problems of the state’s mentally ill—over­crowding, skimpy facilities and finances, personnel shortages and the traditional indifference of the public—Paul Henry Hoch brought a continental courtesy and coolness and the thorough­ness of a laboratory researcher.

Dr. Hoch was a modest but forthright man of whom an as­sociate once said: “He has a faculty for making you feel understood.”

Governor Rockefeller last night described Dr. Hoch as a “wonderfully warm, understand­ing human being,” deeply dedi­cated to the cause of public psychiatry.”

Mode of operation by Hoch,
“In 1953, Henry Blauer, a 42-year old professional tennis player, sought treatment at NYS Psychiatric Institute for depression following a divorce. Without his knowledge or consent, he was used as a guinea human pig in a horrific mescaline drug experiment that killed him. Drs. Paul Hoch and James Cattell subjected Mr. Blauer to multiple injections of massive doses of a mescaline derivative whose ingredients they did not even know. Cattell reportedly told Army investigators, “We didn’t know whether it was dog piss or what it was we were giving him.” (Manchurian Candidate, 1979 Chapter 4, footnote )”

And don’t forget Joseph Kennedy’s daughter, Rosemary, who he had lobotomized. Lots of links if you search, and not sure which one may be correct one, but do know he had it done, and wife, Rose, JFK’s mother, was against it.